Group XXXVII of MAK Center Residents Present Influences of Los Angeles 6 Month Stay

MAK Center Artists and Architects-in-Residence

   

The Group XXXVII of MAK Center Residents present the results of their six-month stay in Los Angeles.  This is always re really cool event to check out if you are looking for something to do in Los Angeles.  Below is a list of the current Residents showing their work and a brief summary of the work being shown.  The opening reception is on Thursday, March 13, 2014, 7-9pm with the show continuing March 14-16, 11am-6pm.  Admission is FREE!

Christian Mayer

Vienna-based German artist Mayer invites visitors to share his focus on an Exposition Park palm tree. At 170 years, this tree is one of the oldest living things in Los Angeles that can be evidenced with photographs. During its lifespan, the city has transformed from a small pueblo to megalopolis, and the tree itself has been relocated from quiet Palm Springs to the front of the historic train station in the 1880s where it symbolized California to the newly arrived, to its current bucolic park setting, its service commemorated with a plaque. Mayer's project will reflect on the dichotomy of this tree as a simple palm (like thousands of others in L.A.) and a very special bearer of history and sentiment.

For jaywalk, Mayer will present material for a time capsule to be buried near the tree on the 100th anniversary of its move to Exposition Park. Video and photographic works will form an installation in the Garage Top. A real palm of the same species (Californian Fan Palm) will stand in the Mackey Courtyard, boxed to echo the mobility of the original. At approximately 18 feet high, the palm will allow visitors to gaze into its branches from the Garage Top gallery.

Heidrun Holzfeind

From time spent in master-planned social housing sites of the 1930s-40s, as well as research into a mobile home designed by R.M. Schindler, Vienna-based Austrian artist Heidrun Holzfeind has delved into the user experience of modern architecture in Los Angeles. For jaywalk, she will present a series of self-portraits in yoga poses, inscribing her body into the interior architecture of the Mackey Apartments. In homage to artist Valie Export's series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations), Holzfeind's "Schindler Yoga" uses the body as a kind of measuring device to consider the relationship between the user and architectural space. The black and white photographs by architectural photographer Joshua White will be installed in her apartment.

With similar intentions, Holzfeind's "(sleeping) nook" will transform the dining nook in her kitchen into an extra bedroom, exchanging the built-in benches and table for a bed with a wall-to-wall, eleven-sided mattress. The mattress pad transfers the peculiar shape and three dimensional space of the nook-reminiscent of a trailer, crystal, spaceship or womb-into a polygonal object, which can be variously used as a giant floor pillow, an object hung on the wall, or a space to read or contemplate.

Johannes Zotter

Austrian-born, Vienna-based architect Johannes Zotter has become engaged with a Los Angeles obsession: the ever-impending, catastrophic earthquake. Emergency preparedness kits are required decoration in the majority of L.A. homes and automobiles, and Zotter examines the logic of the earthquake in the cultural psyche of Southern California.

A video and kinetic installation in the Mackey Garages will mimic the experience of an earthquake. Visitors to the show will step up onto a constructed platform beneath an immersive video screen that will vibrate intermittently while viewers watch aerial footage of fault lines in L.A. County. The various quakes will be measured with seismographic equipment located throughout the exhibition.

Deniz Sözen

Austrian-born, Istanbul-based artist Deniz Sözen has navigated Los Angeles by its ethnic enclaves, from Chinatown to Koreatown to Little Armenia and Little Ethiopia. Arguing that a key component of the American city are these neighborhoods where previously un-associated cultures are placed side-by-side and expected to coexist, Sözen has produced an experimental documentary video exploring multiculturalism in Los Angeles. The video presents a case study of two such spatially overlapping areas: Little Armenia and Thai Town in East Hollywood.

Called "transangeles" and shown in her apartment, the video will be composed of interviews with leading figures of those communities and an aesthetic exploration of how visual elements and architecture contribute to the performance/staging of cultural identity and belonging. The soundtrack will combine samples of Thai and Armenian music and will be commissioned from L.A.-based, American-Armenian musician and composer Bei Ru. Adjacent, a shorter making of video reflects on Sözen's own perspective as a visitor from Europe. As a self-reflexive appendix to the installation, the artist plans to put up a street sign in front of the Mackey Apartments, designating the zone as "Little Austria."

Michael Hieslmair

Vienna-based Austrian architect Michael Hieslmair has traveled all around Los Angeles and to Tijuana in search of nodes of mobility and migration. From hotels to bus stations to the Department of Motor Vehicles, Hieslmair has used such locations as case studies for the ways in which L.A., and every city, is part of a network shaped by transnational connections and specific zones that modulate the exchanges between it and the rest of the world. He has been particularly concerned with how migratory movements and the globalized exchange of goods and services become visible, along with the fact that political change can often be found immediately looming in these zones.

Hieslmair will present both an installation and a three-part workshop at the Mackey Garages in collaboration with L.A.-based urban planner James Rojas. The installation will cover the courtyard and driveway of the Mackey site with colored tape to create a map of the Los Angeles Basin, highlighting three specific movement patterns the architect has observed. "The Push and Pull!" workshops (February 17, March 9, and March 13) are open to the public and invite participants to contribute stories about their mobility and migration experiences. Responses will then be integrated into a three-dimensional, walk-in map installed inside a garage.

Mackey Apartments and Garage Top

1137 South Cochran Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90019

For further information, please visit MAKCenter.org call (323) 651-1510.